Healthcare Technology Featured Article

Wanda and Dignity Health recently launched OncoVerse, a decision-support platform that facilitates collaboration in the treatment of cancer patients. Its designers seek to make the process of defining a course of treatment more efficient, and ensure that all members of the team involved in treatment are on the same page.

San Francisco-based Wanda, Inc. is a NetScientific Inc. portfolio company that develops remote monitoring healthcare analytics for the treatment of chronic diseases. In stating its mission, Wanda paints a grim picture of future plagued with rising healthcare costs. One statistic from the World Economic Forum in particular stands out: by 2030 overall healthcare costs will result in a cumulative output loss of $47 trillion by 2030 if no changes are made to chronic disease management.

Dignity Health is a San Francisco-based health system with more than 60,000 caregivers that operate in 21 different states. The non-profit emphasizes providing affordable care to low income and underserved patients and takes a holistic approach towards how it treats patients.

Wanda supports the concept of precision care as an effective method in reducing the cost of chronic disease. Each individual patient has their own unique combination of health issues to deal with, and one-size-fits-all treatments waste time and money trying to solve the problem.

A thorough knowledge of a patient’s history and all the pieces of information that define their unique condition make it easier to customize an effective course of treatment.

This approach gets a lot of pushback however, from patients concerned about privacy and the possible misuse of their medical information. The matter of what limits should be placed on patient information is one that will probably not be resolved by companies like Wanda, but instead be fought in courts for years to come.

In working with Dignity Health to create OncoVerse, Wanda has identified other unnecessary costs that can be reduced through technology. The last thing a stage 4 cancer patient needs is to endure a treatment team that is so disorganized, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

Modern customer care solutions address the left-hand/right hand problem effectively because they are designed in such a way that an agent can see all the pertinent facts about a customer’s support issue and pick up where other agents left off.

OncoVerse takes a similar approach in healthcare treatment. Care givers can see what has been done to treat a patient and follow up with the right course of action. It reduces duplicated effort and in some cases the wrong effort, during treatment, resulting in significant cost savings.

It will be interesting to see what other cost-saving opportunities Wanda can identify. Healthcare makes up one-sixth of the U.S. economy and will eventually take up a bigger share unless changes are made soon in the industry.